Design, fabrication and implementation of a high-performance compliant nanopositioner via 3D printing with continuous fiber-reinforced composite

Nanopositioning systems have been widely applied in scientific and emerging industrial applications. With simplicity in design and operation, flexure bearings with spatial constraints and voice coil based nano-actuators are considered in designing compliant compact nanopositioning systems. To achieve nano-metric positioning quality, monolithic fabrication of the positioner is preferred, which calls for 3D printing fabrication. However, conventional plastic material-based 3D printing suffers from low mechanical performances, and it is challenging to monolithically fabricate 3D compliant mechanisms with high mechanical performances. Here, we study the fabrication of continuous carbon fiber reinforced composites by 3D printing of the double parallelogram flexure beam structures for spatial constrained nanopositioner with enhanced vertical stiffness. Also, with the consideration of the beam structure design, the process parameters for embedding the carbon fibers are optimized to enhance the beam strengths. Experimental results demonstrate a significant performance improvement with the composite based nanopositioner in both stiffness and natural frequency, and its positioning resolution of 30 nm is achieved. The result of this study will serve as the building block to apply advanced 3D printing of composite structure for precision engineering in the presence of more complex spatial structures.